.
Throughout the novel, Susanna has a clever way of avoiding why she was there. She was a "voluntary admission, " although she was obviously under great pressure from both family and the psychiatrist who admitted her. She acknowledges that she made a suicide attempt, although she saved herself by getting herself to a public area where she collapsed. And we don't find out most of these details until towards the end of the book. In the beginning of the book, we are told that the psychiatrist seemed to focus on a pimple she had picked at that day. We have to wonder at first why he would make the call to have her admitted after examining a pimple. Although I later figured out that it was a suggestion at the time, that the psychiatrist wildly over-interpreted to get to a common symptom of her diagnosis borderline personality, self-mutilation. It isn't until near the very end of the book she mentions that she also used to scratch her face and rub soap in the scratches to aggravate them and make them look worse. There is no real talk of her parents so I couldn't tell you how her family affected her. Though she looks to her roommates in the ward to figure out if she is "crazy"" or not. She stares at them, is curious and wonders what goes in their heads, what they are up to when they are not in sight, and what their backgrounds entail, even though she doesn't let on much about her own. One helpful person I think is her "future husband " because for one, getting married got her out of the hospital, and also because he seemed to care about her a lot and want the best for her. Susanna doesn't talk about her family, so I don't know how they affected her being in the hospital.
A well developed coping strategy I noticed was Susanna's intelligence, though I don't know if she knew it at the time. She could analysis almost any situation, and for the most part could see what was really going on. We learn far more about the difficulties her ward mates have than the difficulty she has.
